Encapsulated Ni-Co alloy nanoparticles as efficient catalyst for hydrodeoxygenation of biomass derivatives in water

Catalytic hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) is one of the most promising strategies to transform oxygen-rich biomass derivatives into high value-added chemicals and fuels, but highly challenging due to the lack of highly efficient nonprecious metal catalysts. Herein, we report for the first time of a facile synthetic approach to controllably fabricate well-defined Ni-Co alloy NPs confined on the tip of N-CNTs as HDO catalyst. The resultant Ni-Co alloy catalyst possesses outstanding HDO performance towards biomass-derived vanillin into 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol in water with 100% conversion efficiency and selectivity under mild reaction conditions, surpassing the reported high performance nonprecious HDO catalysts. Impressively, our experimental results also unveil that the Ni-Co alloy catalyst can be generically applied to catalyze HDO of vanillin derivatives and other aromatic aldehydes in water with 100% conversion efficiency and over 90% selectivity. Importantly, our DFT calculations and experimental results confirm that the achieved outstanding HDO catalytic performance is due to the greatly promoted selective adsorption and activation of C=O, and desorption of the activated hydrogen species by the synergism of the alloyed Ni-Co NPs . The findings of this work affords a new strategy to design and develop efficient transition metal-based catalysts for HDO reactions in water.